Mother Teresa Dies: Calcutta's Saint of the Poor

Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, five days after Princess Diana. The world had barely finished mourning one when it lost the other. The contrast between the two women, one defined by glamour and the other by austere devotion, dominated newspaper front pages for a week. Born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Ottoman Macedonia (now North Macedonia) on August 26, 1910, to an Albanian family, she joined the Sisters of Loreto at eighteen and was sent to India. She taught at a school in Calcutta for nearly two decades before experiencing what she described as a "call within a call" in 1946, a divine instruction to leave the convent and work directly with the poorest people she could find. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 with twelve members. The order grew into one of the largest and most visible charitable organizations on earth, running over 600 missions in 123 countries by the time of her death. Her nuns ran hospices, orphanages, soup kitchens, and clinics for people with leprosy, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. At the ceremony in Oslo, she used the acceptance speech to argue against abortion, which startled the committee and some of the audience. She was not a diplomat. She said what she believed. Her methods drew sharp criticism from aid workers, journalists, and medical professionals. Christopher Hitchens published a sustained critique in 1995, arguing that her clinics provided minimal medical care, that she glorified suffering rather than alleviating it, and that she accepted donations from dictators. Medical volunteers described facilities that lacked basic painkillers and reused needles. Her defenders argued that she was running hospices for the dying, not hospitals, and that comfort and dignity, not cure, were the mission. Her own spiritual life was far more troubled than the public knew. Letters published posthumously in 2007 revealed decades of spiritual darkness, a sustained absence of the faith she publicly professed. She described feeling abandoned by God for nearly fifty years. She was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2016.